The process of building a mental representation of discourse in real time largely depends on the identification and interpretation of discourse relations that link utterances. Such discourse relations include addition, causality or temporality (Mann & Thompson 1988) and are often signalled by so-called discourse markers (henceforth DMs). DMs can be defined as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (Schiffrin, 1987: 31), and include expressions such as et, pourtant, donc or en effet in French. Discourse markers may be used systematically to signal a specific discourse relation, and thus have a strong core meaning (e.g. French néanmoins ‘nevertheless’ for concession). However, it has been established that a single DM can be used to express several discourse relations, leading to different possible interpretations (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Kortmann, 2000; Asher & Lascarides, 2003). This is the case for DMs such as French et ‘and’ or alors ‘then/well’, which are notoriously multi-functional and variable in meaning (Luscher & Moeschler, 1990; Hansen, 1997). This creates challenges for corpus-based studies that aim at disambiguating and annotating the meaning-in-context of DMs, even when such annotation is performed by experts (Spooren & Degand 2010; Zufferey & Degand 2013; Crible & Degand, in press). In this study we investigate how people without specific training or expertise in linguistics (naïve subjects) identify discourse relations introduced by French et and alors, as compared to experts’ annotation. Our hypothesis is that subjects without any experience in annotating discourse relations will tend to associate each DM with its core meaning rather than its alternative meanings. For example, we expect that subjects will tend to identify a connector such as and as inducing an addition rather than a relation of specification. Naïve annotators may better reflect natural discourse processing than careful linguistic annotation (e.g. Scholman et al., 2016). We present the results of two annotation experiments and an acceptability judgment task. In the first experiment, 44 naïve participants were asked to annotate discourse relations in 176 sequences of utterances, using a multiple-choice procedure. Each sequence contains a first segment (S1), a DM (et or alors) and a second segment (S2). For each DM, four different discourse relations were proposed: two of them were shared by both DMs (consequence and specification); in addition, alors could also convey topic shift or concession, while et could express addition or temporality. All S1s and some of the S2s were extracted from original spoken data (LOCAS-F corpus, Degand et al., 2014). A number of S2s were constructed to represent additional discourse relations and were controlled for syntactic structure. The original sequences have been annotated by two of the authors who have reached a consensus after discussion of disagreements (see Degand & Simon (2016) for more details). Participants were recruited on Facebook from the Participants’ Pool of the Psychology Department of the Université catholique de Louvain, and had no previous experience in annotating discourse relations. Participants took part in the experiment by way of email exchanges with the first author. A document explaining and illustrating the six discourse relations was sent to subjects prior to the annotation. They were then asked to choose one of the four proposed relations for each sequence. Results were compared to the experts’ annotations. The first experiment was then identically replicated a second time by 44 different naïve participants with the notable difference that, this time, the sequences did not contain any DM. This second condition aims at testing whether originally explicit discourse relations (i.e. signalled by a DM) can be disambiguated without a DM, and what effect this implicitation has on inter-annotator agreement. Lastly, in the rating task, a different group of participants was asked to judge each sequence for acceptability using a Likert scale. Annotations from the first condition (i.e. the DM is visible in the sequences) were analysed based on several criteria. When compared to the original expert annotations performed by the authors, the percentage of naïve annotators that chose the same discourse relation exceeds 50% for each of the six discourse relations. However, these scores differ depending on the relation, ranging from 50.2% for the temporality relation expressed by the DM et to 75.33% for the consequence relation expressed by alors. These two extreme values seem to be linked with the core meaning of these two connectors, in that alors often can induce a relation of consequence, whereas et alone (i.e. without any other temporal cues) is not likely to be perceived as conveying a temporal relation between two segments. However, the results relating to the expression of addition by et were unexpected. Naïve annotators were somewhat reluctant to identify et as conveying the relation of addition between S1 and S2, even though it corresponds to the core meaning of this marker. Furthermore, this result also seems to refute the hypothesis that some of the discourse relations would be more or less transparent for non-experts. In cases where et was used to express consequence, there was agreement between the expert and naïve annotators in 64% of the cases. We then analysed cases of disagreement between naïve and the expert annotators, in order to detect regularities in the identification of relations in these sequences. Results show that sequences with alors annotated as expressing specification and concession by the experts tend to be annotated as expressing consequence by naïve annotators (in 18.59% and 21.82% respectively), and topic shift tends to be interpreted as a concession (in 17.32% of all annotations). Interestingly, the acceptability test showed that the subjects never considered the topic-shift sequences as acceptable. We hypothesise that in order for alors to indicate topic-shift, it must be used with a particular prosodic contour (a clear melodic reset). In cases where there was no agreement on alors signalling a consequence relation, it was mainly interpreted as concession or as specification. In the case of et, subjects were inclined to annotate other relations as being either an addition (namely consequence annotated as addition in 15.81%, specification in 25.30% and temporality in 22.53%) or a consequence (sequences identified as addition by the experts were annotated as consequence by the naïve annotators in 18.18% of all cases). In the second condition (i.e. without the original DM in the sequences), preliminary results show some modifications as for the agreement between naïve and the expert annotators. First, the scores of agreement (in percentages) seem to increase for utterances originally containing the DM alors except for the consequence relation where a loss of 10 points has been noticed. Thus, the consequence relation tends to be more difficult to identify when the alors DM is deleted. On the other hand, removing the same DM from sequences carrying out other relations seems to enhance their interpretation, reinforcing the idea of consequence being the core meaning of this DM and leading us to suppose that the use of alors in other situations can be troubling for the naïve annotators, especially in written stimuli (without audio). Utterances originally containing the DM et exhibit the opposite behaviour in that the agreement between the two groups of annotators decreases systematically, except for the discourse relation of consequence. This relation is more or less stable with a gain of 1.6 per cent compared to the annotation with the original DM, which points to a strong tendency to infer cause-effect relations even in the absence of an explicit marker (cf. causality-by-default hypothesis, Sanders 2005). By contrast, the temporality score of inter-group agreement falls down to 42.39%. Turning to the cases where no agreement was observed between the naïve and the expert annotators, the tendencies for alors do not change from the results obtained in the first part of this experiment (e.g. where sequences contained the DM). As for et, when excluding the identical annotations, subjects mostly identified addition as being specification, whereas all the other relations were mostly annotated as addition. These results lead to the conclusion that, in some cases, naïve subjects do not base their judgment exclusively on the core meaning or on the assumed transparency of discourse relations, but on other elements as well (in line with the results of Mak, Tribushinina & Andreiushina (2013)). Some of the additional elements that affect the interpretation of an utterance may include syntactic or lexical patterns as well as prosody. This study also discusses the informative value of the DM on the construal of discourse relations by comparing annotations with or without the original DM. We have shown that the two DMs do not seem to have the same impact on the annotation of discourse relations: deleting alors improves the inter-group agreement scores, whereas deleting et deteriorates the same scores. For the two DMs, however, the consequence relation behaved differently from other relations. Moreover, inter-group differences observed in annotations underline the importance of using naïve participants to such tasks in order to compare alternative interpretations of linguistic phenomena (using a methodology similar to the one in Scholman & Demberg (2017), for example). The present preliminary study is carried out in the larger context of a research project investigating the contribution of prosody to the online interpretation of discourse relations. The next steps of the project involve production and perception studies on the discriminating value of some prosodic parameters in the disambiguation of the discourse relations and DMs investigated in the present paper.